Ian Mulgrew: Cameras in court bring more transparency and more accountability

While jurists in B.C. continue to wring their hands over even restricted camera access to their courtrooms, U.S. jurisdictions have embraced live video streaming of arraignments, pleas, bail hearings, surrender proceedings and U.S. jurisdictions have already embraced live video streaming of arraignments, pleas, bail hearings, surrender proceedings and other judicial business.

B.C.’s highest court is set Monday to begin a pilot video-streaming project that underscores how the province’s judiciary needs to enter the modern age.

Photograph by: Mark van Manen
, Vancouver Sun

B.C.’s highest court is set Monday to begin a pilot video-streaming project that underscores how the province’s judiciary needs to enter the modern age.

If all goes well, the B.C. Court of Appeal will live-stream the arguments in an assisted-suicide case.

It’s about time.

A year ago, Victoria backed away from its commitment to televise trials of Stanley Cup rioters because it was too difficult given institutional resistance.

Provincial Court Judge Malcolm MacLean overstated the risks and ignored two decades of reasoned discourse to draw the curtain and ensure the public didn’t get a first-hand view of what has been dubbed the legal system’s “culture of delay.”

In March 2011, B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Bauman did exactly what the Court of Appeal is doing today and allowed cameras to record arguments on the polygamy constitutional case.

It didn’t top the ratings, but neither the cameras nor the broadcasting caused a ripple.

Why would it?

Appeal cases, or the constitutional question proceedings, involve nothing more than lawyers reading to each other — there is no reason not to broadcast them.

In fact, our top appellate bench, the Supreme Court of Canada, has been before the lens since 1997.

At the 2001 trial of former premier Glen Clark, then-B.C. Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth Bennett said media coverage should not be determined on a case-by-case basis but rather after approval by the judiciary as a whole.

More than a decade later, we’re still waiting.

In 2010, former attorney general Mike de Jong called for a pilot project to put cameras in courthouses in Vancouver, Victoria and Kamloops to televise sentencing hearings exactly like the riot cases.

His successor, former attorney general Barry Penner, nixed the plan a year later in the face of opposition from judges.

While jurists in B.C. continue to wring their hands over even restricted camera access to their courtrooms, U.S. jurisdictions have embraced live video streaming of arraignments, pleas, bail hearings, surrender proceedings and other judicial business.

In 2011, the United Kingdom allowed cameras into some courts.

Cameras bring more transparency and more accountability to the system.

For years, the mainstream discourse has been about addressing judicial concerns and ensuring no one’s right to a fair trial is jeopardized.

We have established provisions that allow judges the ability to ensure that a fair and impartial trial is not compromised and that protocols are in place to protect vulnerable witnesses, shield victims of sexual abuse or provide anonymity to undercover agents and informants.

No one has ever argued everything should be broadcast, just as not everything that happens in court is public or publishable.

Solutions to judicial worries are available.

Courts of appeal in several provinces have already run pilot projects.

A 10-day Ontario hearing into the infamous 1959 murder that led to the wrongful conviction of Steven Truscott was streamed live on the Web and archived online. Afterwards in 2007, that province conducted a $325,000 pilot project of webcasting 21 cases argued before the Ontario Court of Appeal.

There has been no problem.

Last week U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy even provided a new reason for letting cameras in — budget-strapped newspapers are laying off experienced court reporters.

“This is a real check,” on the courts, he said, and without journalists being present, cameras could be an important substitute.

He’s right — if a bit of a hypocrite, since his own doddering bench doesn’t allow cameras.

We don’t need a pilot project about cameras in the courtrooms, we need to install them.

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